The Deep Thinker Rising Through a Shallow Pentagon
Elbridge Colby, a strategist in the Pentagon who wants to focus America’s might on China, wields outsized clout in an administration increasingly short on expertise.
At ease in both deeps and shallows.
Photographer: Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images
In national security as in other policy areas, President Donald Trump has been gutting what he derides as the “deep state,” and turning it into what some scholars now call a “shallow state” — a government in which careers depend less on expertise and more on sycophancy.
But even a government of the shallow, by the shallow, for the shallow needs depth in certain functions. This means that the remaining people in the administration who know their brief, as long as they’re also politically adroit, may play an outsized role in setting strategy.